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The Ethics of Synthetic Meat and Cannibalism

So if you haven’t been tuned in to the biotechnology buzz in the last few years, you might not know that scientists think they may be able to grow meat without growing animals in the near future. People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals has even offered a reward for it. And it looks win-win, [...]

Posted 15 April 2009 Adam § , § Comments (2)

Pro-Life celebrations of choice?

I thought: something uncontroversial for my first post back in a while. With GOP Chairman Michael Steele’s “outrageous” remark that abortion might be a woman’s individual choice and Palin’s gladness during the campaign that her daughter had made a decision to keep her new baby, I’ve begun to wonder how many pro-life politicians really understand [...]

Posted 13 March 2009 Adam § , , § Comments (4)

Are skin cells potential persons?

In my bioethics course, we’re in the middle of a three week tour through the issues of cloning, stem cell research, and abortion. There seem to be three important camps on the status of the embryo (or fetus as things progress, but embryos are what I’ll be concerned with here). Either it’s a person, it’s [...]

Posted 24 October 2007 Adam § , , , , § Comments (0)

Healthcare

There is an excellent article in today’s Washington Post about what would and would not constitute “socialized” medicine in our country. We read an article on healthcare in my bioethics class by the same author. Update: The article, which according to what I read yesterday appeared on A17 of the actual Washington Post, has completely [...]

Posted 08 October 2007 Adam § , § Comments (7)

New Philosophy

I’m not really a Buddhist, nor do I believe a lot of Buddhist philosophical claims, but I do find it all terribly fascinating. That’s why I was happy to see that Mark Siderits has a new book out called Buddhism as Philosophy. And it’s published by none other than Hackett, so it’s cheap (also impermanent, [...]

Posted 26 September 2007 Adam § , , , , § Comments (0)

Autonomy, Euthanasia, and the Morality of Suicide

Covering James Rachels’ argument against the distinction between killing and letting die in Bioethics this semester led to an interesting argument today. I’ve always thought Rachels’ thought experiment was pretty ingeniously designed to isolate the moral relevance of killing versus letting die. But really the main taget of his argument has to be the physician. [...]

Posted 13 September 2007 Adam § , , § Comments (1)